On April 1, the staff at On the Boards was in a near panic. For the first time in the theater’s 33-year history, US immigration officials denied its request to bring an international artist to Seattle. This was after On the Boards spent four months and $4,000 in fees and legal costs to make sure its visa petition was in impeccable order. “It has always been a huge expense and months of work to bring in artists from overseas,” said managing director Sarah Wilke. “It’s very hard to get visas, and it’s kind of an unknown part of this business.”
At the very last minute, just days before the artists were set to come into the United States, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) issued its denial.
The company in question is Vivarium Studio, a French group that performs some of the least controversial performance art you’ve ever seen. (In L’Effet de Serge, a charmingly melancholy man invites friends over to his apartment and does simple visual tricks with lights, sparklers, and wigs, set to classical and pop music.) What was the USCIS’s explanation for the denial? The USCIS didn’t think an Obie Award the company had won in New York was “of sufficient significance” to justify letting them perform again in the United States.
“We were 99 percent sure we’d have to cancel the show,” Wilke said. “We were told by all the lawyers, all the government officials, and Homeland Security that there was absolutely no way we could get that reversed.”
The staff of On the Boards kicked into overdrive. They called immigration lawyers, they had the French ambassador put in a good word, and they directly faxed Janet Napolitano, the current secretary of Homeland Security. Finally, Congressman Jim McDermott stepped into the fight and, just as mysteriously as the USCIS denied the visas, it then approved them.
Wilke was relieved, if baffled. On the Boards brings international artists to its stage every year, and while it’s always a pain in the ass, it had never been that difficult before. “It’s kind of hilarious that this is the show the government didn’t want to let in,” she said. “It’s so sweet and personal and soft—not like some of the other shows we’ve brought in that maybe the government would want to be worried about. Now we just have $6,000 of international flight change fees to deal with.”
The USCIS’s behavior in this case is part of a dramatic recent trend: Immigration attorneys across the US are grumbling that the agency has been increasingly difficult to deal with. Challenges and outright denials of routine applications—sometimes for artists who’ve been approved many, many times in the past—are on the rise. Matthew Covey, an arts lawyer in New York for Texas music festival South by Southwest, said he saw a spike in a specific kind of challenge to applications he was filing earlier this year. The “request for evidence” challenges jumped from 5 percent to 60 percent, and then, just as mysteriously, they fell again. “It’s a weird and complex system,” he said. “And there’s a real sense of inconsistency. The music industry is in turmoil about it.”
“I was at an all-time high of frustration last year,” said Brent Renison of Entry Law, who does pro bono visa work for the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art. “I got a denial that was just completely erroneous. A supervisor at USCIS looked at my request to have this reviewed and said, ‘If you want to appeal, appeal—and pay the appeal fee [$650].’ But if I appealed, it would take 22 months—the office of appeals is backlogged for almost two years because they’ve had so many appeals from these denied visas. So I said, ‘I am not going to appeal—I am going to sue you.'”
Renison was almost immediately informed that the agency had reversed its decision and the visa would be approved.
That kind of capriciousness, lawyers say, is characteristic of the USCIS, and a sign of problems with oversight. “There is this cadre of really difficult examiners,” Renison said, “faceless civil servants who hide behind their manager’s signature.”
George Tzamaras of the American Immigration Lawyers Association in Washington, DC, put it more bluntly: “It seems like an attitude of no. There have been problems across the board—not just for performers, but for universities to get top-quality scientists and professors, in the nursing industry, in the elderly-care industry. There were more deportations in the first two years of the Obama administration than in the entirety of the Bush administration.”
This sternness from the USCIS has more dire consequences than months of work and thousands of dollars wasted to get artists into a theater for a weekend: In the case of Joseph Bokombe, an openly gay musician from Uganda, it could be fatal.
Bokombe has spent the last five years in San Diego but is now being held by immigration officials and is facing imminent deportation for overstaying his cultural exchange visa. Friends report that Bokombe was afraid to return to Uganda, where homosexuality is illegal and the government has been working on a bill to make it a capital offense. A friend of Bokombe’s told a San Diego reporter last week that his fellow countryman probably wouldn’t make it “even past the airport” before he was arrested or killed.
Why has the USCIS become so strict and difficult under the Obama administration? “That’s a good question,” Tzamaras said. “It’s possible that the Obama administration, in response to criticism that it wouldn’t enforce immigration laws as strictly, has gone the other direction.” Covey, the SXSW attorney, thinks it’s something more banal, like plain old institutional confusion—which is less sinister than a top-down conspiracy, but no less harmful in its effects.
And what does the USCIS have to say for itself? Sharon Rummery, a public affairs official with the agency, said The Stranger “probably couldn’t” talk to Rosemary Melville, director of the USCIS California Service Center—which reviews many of the nonimmigrant petitions and is frequently criticized by immigration attorneys. She recommended a look at the USCIS website, which says the official processing time for the visas in question is a mere two weeks. “But several lawyers have told me that the processing time takes months,” I said. “I can’t explain that,” she said.
Crystal Williams, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association has an explanation: The USCIS is spinning a line of bullshit. “We spend a lot of time talking about what a joke those official processing times are,” she said. “They just can’t be believed.”
Just ask On the Boards. 
This article has been updated since its original publication.
Jim McDermott is a long-term Congressional Representative of the 7th District. You didn’t know Washington has two female senators, Brendan?
Thanks for the rapid fix.
It’s great to see this issue getting some attention.
It is a growing concern indeed. Portland Baroque Orchestra recently had similar experiences securing visa approvals for known, international expert performers of 18th century classical music. Fortunately, our US Representative’s office (that of Earl Blumenauer) has managed to help our small organization, which does not have a budget line for a specialized immigration attorney.
In the end all the visas were issued but at a additional cost of several thousand dollars in fees to USCIS and professional unions, many hours of additional work, that a great deal of stress and embarrassment. The embarrassment arises from trying to explain to artists who perform all over the world that, after they agreed to work for increasingly devalued US dollars, at rates much lower than they get at home, the US government does not think they are qualified to perform here and they may not be allowed to bring their art here at all.
There is, in fact, an entire industry growing around the bureaucracy. In addition to the lawyers now required to wade through the red tape, the professional unions who are qualified to provide “letters of consultation” are taking their cut, at the expense of struggling presenters — mostly non-profit organizations.
For example, the American Guild of Musical Artists (“AGMA” representing vocal soloists at most opera companies in the USA) is the only organization authorized to provide “letters of consultation” for professional singers, These form letters cost of $250 each, plus an additional $250 if you want to guarantee immediate processing (which is often necessary).
These pro forma letters from AGMA — about 50 words total — require perhaps 30 minutes, at most, to issue. Just two months ago, when we needed to have one such letter, for which we had already paid $500, reissued with the name altered from that of a vocal ensemble to one of it’s members, was charged an additional $250, plus $250 for expediting.
Thus, in addition to the $3,000+ paid to USCIS for recent application and re-application nightmares, AMGA earned another $1,000 from Portland Baroque Orchestra, thanks to this increasingly bureaucratic system.
On the bright side, if you are willing to spend an additional $1,225 up front to USCIS for “premium processing” (in addition to regular application fees) they tend not to deny at all, so I am told. So maybe it’s just a new price structure.
Tom Cirillo
Portland Baroque Orchestra
Xenophobia comes from the hometown of Jim Crow.
How do you know these are examiners hiding behind the signature of their manager? In government, you do what your manager wants, especially if its his signature on the document. There is no hiding behind his or her signature.
And what about the Bush administration. Obama famously didn’t challenge the US Attorneys who serve at the pleasure of the President but who refused to resign when Obama requested it. And what about all those “implants” from the Bush administration (political appointees illegally given civil service jobs by Bush with civil service job protections who remain in higher goverment offices stirring up trouble for the opposition)?
There are also many Americans who have been thus unemployed since 2009, due to similar actions by their own government and its unelected, faceless bureaucrats(both public and privatized)
Any U.S. citizen who wants a taste of this Kafka-inspired nightmare need only attempt to work at a good old American blue-collar roughneck job on the waterfront, as a trucker, or even on the railroad. He will soon discover that he is among the first in U.S. history required to obtain a government-issued Internal Passport (previously an identity document/work permit only issued in places like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany). If the secret police investigation required does not produce an official seal of approval, even for trivial bureaucratic reasons, there is a Problem. After months of waiting, the request is therefore Denied, pending appeal. During the undefined waiting period the American worker finds himself in the unemployment line, as his Papers are Not In Order.
The Obama administration has done nothing but accelerate the cancerous growth of the ‘state security apparatus’ that metastasized with the USA PATRIOT Act. “Homeland Security” is now officially a multi-billion dollar industry, dominated by super-sized war profiteers like Lockheed-Martin (who were cashing government checks amounting to $69 million per DAY, at last count). Their bonus-enriched executive suites and Boards of Directors boast star-studded casts fresh off the stages of the national political theater on the Potomac.
Needless to say, these ‘contractors’ are also major campaign contributors and influence peddlers, deploying battalions of lobbyists in D.C., and PR hacks nationwide.
Reminder: our immigration system is broken – for everyone, artists included. And our economy. It’s not a left/right issue. It’s human. Help fix it.
Is this why Einstruzende Neubauten couldn’t perform in the US and did LAST MINUTE cancellations? Because, really, that makes me feel better toward the band, and much more angry at the government.